Renoir's Dancer by Catherine Hewitt The Secret Life of Suzanne Valadon

...as Catherine Hewitt’s new biography, “Renoir’s Dancer: The Secret Life of Suzanne Valadon,” makes clear, Valadon would have spurned being identified as a feminist, just as she did “the notion of the femme artiste.”
-NY Times

Synopsis

Catherine Hewitt's richly told biography of Suzanne Valadon, the illegitimate daughter of a provincial linen maid who became famous as a model for the Impressionists and later as a painter in her own right.

In the 1880s, Suzanne Valadon was considered the Impressionists’ most beautiful model. But behind her captivating façade lay a closely-guarded secret.

Suzanne was born into poverty in rural France, before her mother fled the provinces, taking her to Montmartre. There, as a teenager Suzanne began posing for—and having affairs with—some of the age’s most renowned painters. Then Renoir caught her indulging in a passion she had been trying to conceal: the model was herself a talented artist.

Some found her vibrant still lifes and frank portraits as shocking as her bohemian lifestyle. At eighteen, she gave birth to an illegitimate child, future painter Maurice Utrillo. But her friends Toulouse-Lautrec and Degas could see her skill. Rebellious and opinionated, she refused to be confined by tradition or gender, and in 1894, her work was accepted to the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, an extraordinary achievement for a working-class woman with no formal art training.

Renoir’s Dancer tells the remarkable tale of an ambitious, headstrong woman fighting to find a professional voice in a male-dominated world.

Catherine Hewitt studied French Literature and Art History at Royal Holloway, University of London and the Courtauld Institute of Art. Her proposal for The Mistress of Paris was awarded the runner-up’s prize in the 2012 Biographers’ Club Tony Lothian Competition for the best proposal by an uncommissioned, first-time biographer. She lives in a village in Surrey.

Critic reviews for Renoir's Dancer
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NY Times

Reviewed by Kathryn Harrison
on
May 29 2018

...as Catherine Hewitt’s new biography, “Renoir’s Dancer: The Secret Life of Suzanne Valadon,” makes clear, Valadon would have spurned being identified as a feminist, just as she did “the notion of the femme artiste.”